“Make sure you smoke a fresh cigar,” advises the Cigar Association of America. “A simple test for determining the freshness of a cigar is to squeeze it gently while holding it to your ear. A fresh cigar will give a little and produce a rustling sound like a cool breeze passing over a lazy palm tree. If the cigar is too dry, however, it will sound brittle like the snap of dried twigs on a sun-scorched prairie.” And a really stale cigar sounds like a person with emphysema trying to breathe, right?
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“You would think that the homeless were born on the street or had dropped out of the sky,” notes Alexander Cockburn of the rush of media coverage of homeless beggars (In These Times, September 28-October 4). “One striking feature of this sudden coverage is the tiny amount of attention given to the cause of the situation. It’s as though cholera were sweeping the nation’s major cities, and no one gave a thought as to why plague had suddenly struck. In the stories I’ve either read or watched about beggars lately, the name of Ronald Reagan has barely been mentioned, as though no known connection existed between slashing funds for public housing, attacking welfare programs of one sort or another and the consequent effect on the targets of these ‘cuts’.”
Dieting produces–blubber, according to John P. Foreyt of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, since most weight lost from dieting is regained within two years. According to a Dairy Nutrition Council description of Foreyt’s views, repeated “weight cycling” actually “increases a person’s percent body fat. The average woman has 22 percent body fat. But, according to Foreyt, after each weight cycle, a woman gains approximately 2 percent body fat. Foreyt has seen women, after years of weight cycling, with 50 percent body fat.”
